When I first heard about the ballot initiative sponsored by Reform Michigan Government Now, I assumed it was just an aggressive effort to make several progressive state constitutional reforms in one fell swoop. Then I looked into it a little more — largely because I was curious about the proposed revisions to the composition of the state judiciary — and was a bit taken aback. Among other things the plan would eliminate two seats on the State Supreme Court and several more on the state Courts of Appeals, but increase the number of state trial judges. Each of these reforms would operate so as to increase the proportion of Democrat-appointed judges on the bench, which is, to the least, a bit curious. Then a strategy document prepared for initiative proponents was discovered, and it all fit into place. The ballot initiative is, at heart, a stealth effort to reform the Michigan state constitution, and shift control of the state courts, for partisan advantage. I discuss the plan in more detail in this NRO column.
There's one interesting development I do not discuss in the column. Initiative opponents are mounting a legal challenge to keep the initiative off the ballot. Among other things, they argue that there is no way to accurately summarize the 19,500-word initiative in 100 words, as required by state law. Initiative proponents defend their efforts, arguing among other things, that state judges should not hear the case because they have a "conflict of interest" due to the fact that some state judges would lose their positions inf the measure passes. What an ingenious argument to evade judicial review!
[Typos fixed — ah the dangers of blogging in an airport.]
Related Posts (on one page):
- Michigan Supreme Court Keeps "Reform" Initiative Off Ballot:
- Michigan Appeals Court Voids "Reform" Initiative:
- Rewriting a State Constitution for Partisan Advantage:
Among other things, this proposal seeks to remove the Republican gerrymandering advantage by requiring redistricting by a neutral bipartisan commission. Would the proponents of this proposal be in favor of this if they had been doing the gerrymandering? Hell, no. But it's still a good idea.
That said, the proposal seems like a mixed bag to me. The stupidest part is the proposal for steep pay cuts for elected officials. Yes, please, let's make these thankless jobs even less attractive to anyone but confirmed narcissists and trust-fund idiots.
I LOVE turnabout being fair play! The important thing is not that Dems stoop below Republican dirty tricks, it's that the right side wins, the Republic be damned!
The unions have lost the last three cycles in the appeal and supreme courts only because the insurance companies out spent them in media buys.
The unions also rule the legislature, but two cycles ago they didn't and had not for a few years.
The court thing is obvious.
Less obvious is the reason for the state house and senate salary cuts. Those serving are allowed second jobs but most can't hold one because it really is a full time plus job. Unions are allowed to pay their members while they serve, PKUS under union contracts they maintain their senority and retirement from the initial employer just like they do for a union position.
I'm not sure there is any clean way to resolve these problems so long as voters keep reelecting state officials who will continue to gerrymander.
I really don't think this proposal will work because the 100 word summary appears designed to avoid 19,000 word amendments that reconstitute the entire state government. Apparently the drafters of the MI state constitution believed it would be unwise to let such a giant iceberg of a change be voted on while only the tip is visible to the average voter.
Here's another thought: the redistricting commission created by the proposal would be staffed by members chosen by the political parties, not by voters in any fashion. The decisions of the commission would become law without any action by the legislature or governor. Can an argument be made that the redistricting section violates the federal guarantee of a republican government, as laws would be made by persons who derive their authority in no way from the will of the people?
This plan is fairly egregious--and the Powerpoint shows how naked of a power grab it really is.
However, Michael Barone, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics, wrote about the 2001 Michigan redistricting in The Almanac of American Politics:Barone went on to note that there were two sets of Democratic incumbents redistricted together; another chose to retire; and Minority Whip David Bonior decided to run for Governor because his district was unwinable.
Those who read this blog know my general partisan sympathies. But I am no hack. And while I am against the Reform Michigan plan, Barone's analysis puts it into context.
This Berkeley webpage matches my memory of the times:
"Democrats dominated the old [California] delegation thanks to districts crafted with an artisan's skill by the late Phil Burton, a Democratic congressman from San Francisco who died in 1983. Burton's gerrymander helped increase the Democrats' grip on the delegation from 22-21 in 1980 to 27-18 following the next election (California gained two seats in the 1980 census). Essentially, Burton split traditionally Democratic minority communities among several districts to enhance Democratic chances, compacted as many Republicans as possible into single districts and drew meandering boundaries in such places as Marin and Orange counties to create Democratic districts in otherwise hostile territory. As a result, Democrats remained dominant throughout the 1980s. But the election of a Republican governor, Pete Wilson, in 1990 ended Democratic hegemony. When Wilson vetoed reapportionment plans pushed through the Democrat-led Legislature in 1991, the task of drawing new congressional districts fell to the California Supreme Court, which appointed a panel of retired judges as 'special masters' to perform the work."
As I recall, that 27-18 (60%) advantage in seats was accomplished with only 40% of the total vote, for a net shift of 9 seats (20% of 45) in just that one state.
I am not suggesting that Democrats invented gerrymandering, though some of them, like Burton, were skilled and shameless practicioners long before the mid-1990s. Both parties have been doing it for many years. Elbridge Gerry -- a 'Democratic-Republican', appropriately enough -- died in 1814.
The unions are the ones bankrolling this initiative.
I have lived in other states, and Michigan is run by the unions. It is really odd just how much power they have.
However, they are not as strong as they once were. When I was growing up they literally were in charge of wide swaths of public life, not just public officeholders.
The union would send kids to approved camps, give Christmas gifts, and literally had 'jap cars' banned from many parking lots around the state.
No pol then could say anything they didn't like and hold office. Now taking a position too strongly against what the union wants will result in a strongly funded opposition, but that is it.
The union has also had to start really gouging the big-3 to keep control of the state. The last few contracts have forced the companies to give a paid day off to the union member for each election day, and provide the unions with fueled vans for transport.
Yes, it does so clearly. The Republicans win an election and redistrict, so the Dems hope to win the next election, redistrict and rig the courts. Nothing wrong with that.
Actually that raises an interesting question- why haven't the big three abandoned Michigan altogether? I know a lot of work has left, but why does any remain. For that matter, why would any business move to Michigan at all these days?
This is an attempt to do something that is plainly forbidden by the Michigan constitution (ballot measure amendments that aren't properly summarized for the ballot). Florida has a similar measure for the same reasons of clarity and honesty- You can't logroll big changes through on the back of something popular without disclosing everything you are doing. This is exactly the sort of ballot initiative such constitutional restrictions guard against.
My program was quick and dirty and would draw really weird boundaries. It would be easy to do a more advanced on that tried to keep traditional neighborhood boundaries intact for example.
No major political party would ever allow something like that be used. It doesn't matter Democrat or Republican, they all know the power of redistricting and they all abuse it.
Unions are powerful in Michigan, but that has not translated into Democratic dominance in state government. John Engler, a very powerful Republican governor, held office from 1991 to 2003. During a substantial part of that period, Republicans held majorities of both houses of the state legislature. They still control the state Senate. The current AG is a Republican.
2) That DeLay's redistricting in Texas "was in response to a decade-old Democrat redistricting whose continuation was abetted by a Federal judge" thus misses the point. In any event, I do not think carving Austin into little tiny pieces was really done simply to restore balance to the Texas voting districts.
I blogged about the possibility of computer-drawn district lines way back in 2002, and got a Kaus link for it. The post is here, though the comments have been lost and many of the links (including Kaus) are dead.
What I did not mention there is what seems to me a very elegant solution: offer a $20,000 prize for the best redistricting plan, with 'best' defined in a totally unambiguous mathematical way. One possibility: the winning plan is the one where the total length of all district boundaries in the state is the shortest. I'm no mathematician, but I believe that would in fact produce very compact and contiguous districts. A second possibility: same definition, but boundaries that follow county lines do not count. That would make for districts that included whole counties as much as possible, while the necessary bites out of neighboring counties to even up the population totals would be as compact as possible. The reason I say that a prize should be offered is that I suspect that computers are not capable of calculating least-total-boundary maps in finite amounts of time, so humans would have to do the designing even as computers did the judging.
We had a verbose and weird food health &environmental initiative on the ballot in California many years back to which the opposition argument was, "Vote for Proposition ## if you understand it.". The initiative was overwhelmingly defeated.
Now, the CA legislative primary is in June, so a bill that passes by majority vote will be legally effective as of the time that candidates file for office.
Nick
Rather than searching for the One True Algorithm, I'd like to see redistricting commissions soliciting proposals from anyone who wanted to make one. Then rate them on number of safe districts for each party, district compactness, split communities, etc. Hold the obnoxious gerrymanders up to public ridicule, and settle on one of the middle-of-the-road plans.
Note: Lazarus is wrong in his argument, if right in his sarcastic statement, for a couple of reasons. Mainly, Lazarus ignores the fundamental differences between protectionist gerrymandering and partisan gerrymandering.
In protectionist gerrymandering, the goal is to protect incumbents by overloading their districts with supporters. In partisan gerrymandering, you try and overload your opponents districts with supporters to create fewer of them, and then create as many vaguely safe (say, 60-40) districts as you can.
Protectionist gerrymandering may lead to more of one party being elected than in a neutral system, but that is not the goal - and it certainly will lead to less than partisan gerrymandering will get you.
A good gerrymandering start is to read the discourse about the topic by Nathaniel Persilly and Issac Issacheroff regarding "Foxes Guarding Henhouses."
As to the states, the same liberal groups are behind California, Pennsylvania, and Florida - and each seek to make redistricting less political. The only difference is that in California, you have them joined by some Republicans, and also you have institutional Democrats who are opposed. That should be hardly shocking. But the fact that it is a liberal group (Common Cause) spearheading the action in EVERY state, and that conservatives have NO record of supporting these types of measures without particular gain, I don't think we can play the whole "both sides are equally bad" game, as fun as it is.
Make the program source code freely available, so that anyone can see how it works. Make the geographic data sets available, so they can run it on their own machine.
Then, allow any citizen to submit a redistricting map. The map with the lowest score wins.
Phil Burton was my godfather and later taught me how to count votes. He helped my father load my mother into the car when she went into labor with me.
CJColluci,
I suggest you read The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Here is the Publishers Weekly review of it on Amazon:
I agree. My point is that the most egregious redistrictings do not take community interests into account. Is a Congressional District comprising, say Manhatten, going to be competitive? Under almost any set of circumstances, the answer is "No." But taking fingers of Manhatten and fingers of Staten Island to eliminate Republican prospects in Staten Island is an example of fairly partisan redistricting. (This is not a real example, but it would be possible to draw such a map).
I'm not sure what I think, but it is provocative.
-dk
Texas congress critters are only allowed to meet in Odd numbered years. We don't want them working to hard.
2001 was the year that the redistricting should have been done. There was a Repub majority but there were enough Dems that they could stop any redistricting from being done. If the Dems had allowed it to be done by working with the Repubs, the Dems would have lost about three seats. Remember when the 1990 redistricting was done Texas was very Democrat, they stuck it to the Repubs. So in 2001 the Dems wouldn't let redistricting be done. They knew that the Judges would make only small changes to the 1990 districts thus leaving the Dems with 3 more seats then they would have with redistricting. The Judges who did the redistricting said that it needed to be revisited by the next legisture.
2002 the Dems lost more seats.
2003 the Repub controled Legisture redistricts as the Judges says they should. The Dems go to court saying that redistricting has already been done. The courts find against the Dems. he Dems make a lot of noise and screem and holler. Then they RUN AWAY and hide. Finally one Dem has the integrity to come back to Austin so that there is 2/3 of the legistrature present. The redistricting is voted on and passed. The Dems lose 6 seats.
Moral - Don't count on the NEXT election to protect a underhanded deal.
The Dems wanted to keep the 1990 Democrat redistricting until 2010 even though the state had gone republican. If they had kept a few more seats in the 2002 election they might have pulled it off. If they hadn't tried to shaft the Repubs in 2001 they might have won more seats in 2002.
No Texas DIDN'T redistrict after a redistricting in 2001. Even the Judges that DID the redistricting in 2001 said that the legistrature should redistrict in 2003.
The Greedy 2001/2003 Texas Democrats got just what they should have, shafted in 2003. And RUNNING AWAY OUT OF STATE (Once to OK, and Once to NM) is NOT a valid tactic.
Some here believe judges should decide such things.
This is some well-drafted legal stuff, these people did their homework. The worst GOP gerrymandering in the state is the US Congressional seats (which are solidly GOP even though the voters lean Dem).
It's unclear who drafted the petition. However, given the fact that Dykem Gossett, a firm that contains some of the state's top GOP election lawyers, is conspiciously absent from the challenges against RMGN, it seems possible that someone in their shop may have drafted it thus creating a conflict for their big Republicans.
What is my circumstantial evidence? Simply this: If the real purpose of this proposal was, as represented to the union, to put the party in a position to avoid judicial tampering with gerrymandering in 2011, then this purpose was clearly served by removing the recourse of appeal to the Supreme Court. Since one provision the proposal already removed any possibility of redistricting appeals, then why enhance the proposal with a second, redundant provision to "gut the GOP" court. The reason, I suggest, is clear. This is not about public policy, or even an elephant versus a donkey; the real fight between is between insurers and plaintiff's lawyers. All involved are made to look like prostitutes - from the plaintiff's bar, the party, the union, insurers, former Governor Engler, and the jurists who have effected such dramatic and devastating judicial tort reforms of their own, and who are now forced to lay bare their naked self interest to prevent this measure from making the ballot. And don't forget Governor Granholm, who, in order to block a Republican block of the RMGN petition certification, refused to make a Republican appointment to Board of State Canvassers, as specifically mandated by the constitution, which is necessary to fill the vacancy caused on that board last week when the Republican member of that solemn body, which is responsible for certifying all elections and maintaining the integrity of the electoral system, had to resign due to his ownership interest of Sterling Corp., a major political PR firm heavily vested in the anti-RMGN cause, and many other election campaigns in Michigan. How did he get put on the board in the first place?
Will they get away with it? That depends on your of definition of "they". One "they" or another will win, and all I really know for sure is that, as usual, "we" probably won't.
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